Monthly Archives: January 2016

In an unexpected announcement, Russia, Denmark, Canada, Norway and the United States have revealed that the Arctic region is to be transported southwards until it becomes a continuation of the Antarctic. The unprecedented accord between traditionally hostile countries has been brought about during specially arranged discussions over a period of months and orchestrated by a United Nations special committee.

“It seemed logical to combine the two areas for a number of reasons” said a spokesperson. “With the ice caps melting, there have been large gaps between ice fields and these can now be eliminated. Furthermore, exploratory expeditions don’t need to pick one area to travel to because they’ll be going to both poles at once. It’s very economical.” It had been suggested that the motives for stripping the North Pole of its ice might involve making access easier for oil drills but this has been hotly refuted by all parties. “If it happens to make things easier for Shell, then that’s an unintended side effect.” remarked one member of the special committee, who declined to reveal how many of its number have shares in the controversial oil company.

The Arctic in its present location

Conservation groups have issued statements of concern over the fate of the Arctic fauna, such as the polar bear and the Arctic fox; while the specific concerns have yet to be addressed, a brief rebuttal was issued, claiming that the mathematical projections have been promising for most animals ‘apart from the penguins and there are loads of them’.

Discussions have yet to take place regarding the name for the newly expanded region, although there have been a number of ideas generated by Twitter users. At the last count, the most popular possibilities were Biarctica, Panpolia and the Northern Powerhouse.

A professional conspiracy theorist from Kent has expressed disappointment that Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister, of the band Motörhead, didn’t die five days earlier, when he was still 69. Dan Lessing, 44, claims this ruined his chances of fabricating a perfect conspiracy theory from the tragic coincidence of both David Bowie and Alan Rickman dying aged 69 from cancer, the disease that also killed Lemmy. “I’m totally devastated at the deaths of these giants of the entertainment world.” Lessing told us, “But as they’re gone anyway, it’s just a shame I can’t make their passing a little more dramatic and sinister with a rumour that dark forces were involved. Or the royal family, which is much the same.”

The father of four, who gave up his insurance sales job in 1997 to focus on perfecting a conspiracy theory about Diana, Princess of Wales, said he had considered trying out a couple of theories regarding Bowie and Rickman, but added “Everybody knows there have to be at least three for it to catch on.”

Mixed success

Some of Lessing’s better known conspiracies include the Wingdings font predicting the 911 attacks, cars which run on household rubbish being suppressed by the oil industry and the existence of a cure for the common cold since 1968. While these have gained considerable support, many of Lessings attempts have fallen flat:

In 2004, he said that David James had died in a car accident and been replaced in the England squad by a female lookalike from a rugby union club in Hull

In 2010, he claimed there was evidence that Ken Bruce was the Grand Master of the British cadre of the Illuminati

Since 1999, he has cast doubt that the Battle of Hastings happened, insisting that the Bayeux Tapestry was just a big comic strip, intended only for entertainment purposes

In spite of experiencing these setbacks, Lessing sees great hope for his profession in the future due to the rise of social media. “In 1997, I spent weeks sending letters to newspapers and telling people in the pub what had really happened to Diana – God rest her beautiful soul – and it cost me a fortune in stamps and beer. Nowadays, I only need to tweet once and it turns up everywhere.”

When we asked him if he was working on anything at the moment, he said he was keeping a close eye on some 69-year-old celebrities and had a ‘special project’ in the pipeline; he refused to elaborate much due to fears that someone may steal his theory. He hinted, however, that it involves Jeremy Corbyn, a Russian cloning laboratory and a reported grave robbing at Highgate Cemetery in 1948.

I don’t have much will power. By way of illustration, I have yet to sort out my wardrobe, having vowed to do it by Christmas. 2013. So, New Year’s resolutions are pretty much an invitation from me to me, saying ‘Dear Oonagh, Please be a massive failure. All the best, Oonagh’ and nobody wants that, least of all the people who would have to listen to me moan about it for the rest of the year. I do, however, want to make some kind of effort just to have something to boast about on Facebook and there’s so much scope for that; I could virtually do anything even half decent and it would herald a better me; it’s one of the beauties of maintaining consistently low standards. This is why I have decided to avoid New Year’s resolutions completely and do twelve ‘New Month resolutions’ for 2016. Surely even I can maintain a change for one month.

Many people are doing ‘dry January’, which involves swearing off alcohol for a month, but I don’t drink the stuff as I’m enough of an idiot without exacerbating factors, and others are doing ‘Veganuary’, which – as you may have guessed if you have the deductive skills of anything more sentient than Donald Trump’s hair – is living a vegan lifestyle for the month of January. The meaner among you may suppose that this involves marching up and down outside butchers’ shops, carrying protest placards, wearing hemp and shouting “I’m a vegan!”, but it really just means living a cruelty-free lifestyle by not eating or drinking any animal derivatives. This is also not an option for me; not because I crave the blood of chickens or have an insatiable desire to attend ‘club your own lamb’ parties, but because I’m already vegan. What I have decided to try and do throughout January is to eat no food that contains added sugar.

If you have ever seen my Twitter account, you may be reasonably convinced that I live on Hobnobs, chocolate, cake and tea, because they’re all a bit of a running theme. You may also be convinced that I have ‘The Bumper Book of Cracker Jokes’ and I’m just tweeting them all for a bet; neither of these things are true. I do eat Hobnobs – which fall into the ‘accidentally vegan food’ category – and I also eat chocolate and cake and I drink A LOT of tea, I mean in ‘the Guinness Book of Records people are on the phone for you’ kind of amounts, but the chocolate and cake are rare treats, partly because I need to find the vegan versions but also because I don’t have much money for treats. I’ve spent it all on tea, hemp clothes and The Bumper Book of Cracker Jokes. Given that I’m not the cake fiend I seem, it should be pretty easy to give up sugar for a month, right? Right? WRONG!

Apparently, there’s a rule that says all food apart from salad and tripe must contain sugar, and I have my suspicions about tripe. There’s sugar in my ‘healthy’ cereal. It’s in most of the bread in the supermarket. It’s in my delicious vegan pesto (that I add to far too many things, if I’m honest). It’s even in salt and vinegar crisps!! So, sugar-free January may prove somewhat trickier than I’d presumed. It took me over an hour to find bread that was both vegan and sugar free, which is why there are eight loaves in my freezer and another on the worktop. I won’t inflict a Venn diagram on you, but if I were to do one of food that is vegan and sugar free, it would have a similar amount of items in the centre as a Venn diagram of ‘Things said by the Kardashian family’ and ‘Things that broadly make sense’. It’s looking as though I may spend January eating fruit, veg, porridge and nine loaves of bread – oh, and ready-salted crisps. I’m beginning to wish I’d opted for ‘New Week’s resolutions’!